Our House(96)

Your guess is as good as mine as to whether this will ever go to trial, if they ever find this other me, this second Fiona Lawson. Neither the estate agent nor the solicitor had a phone number for her, only for Bram, and the address and date of birth she gave were mine. We know she used my passport as her proof of ID and that she and Bram attended a meeting together, posing as us. Both her appearance and signature were credible enough, evidently. No, it’s hard to imagine she will come forward any time soon and get herself slapped with some sort of conspiracy to commit fraud charge. I mean, would you?

As for where the money is, that remains a tangle. Graham Jenson and his colleagues at Dixon Boyle still deny any misconduct and they have emails and phone logs to prove that the details for the receiving account were supplied by Bram himself. The sale proceeds duly landed in a legitimate UK high street account in our joint names: so far so simple (if you overlook the fact that I knew nothing about the opening of said account). But, within hours, the same sum was transferred offshore. Not so simple. There’s talk of anonymous accounts in the Middle East and God knows where else – banking nations with no reciprocity agreement with the UK.

You know what upsets me the most about that? He didn’t need to hide it offshore for tax evasion reasons – there’s no tax owed to the government on this sale. It was purely to hide it from me.

Anyway, the police say they are hopeful of recovering something for me, but my solicitor is more guarded. She says the Serious Fraud Office have bigger fish to fry. Far bigger.

David and Lucy Vaughan are still in the house. It’s legally theirs, after all. Everyone uses that term, they’re the ‘legal’ owners, as if we all agree that I remain the moral one, the spiritual one. They won’t mind my telling you they’ve said that as soon as I am in a position to do so, I can buy it back for market rate, even if we all know I’ll never be in a position to do that. With all of this going on, I’ve been lucky to keep hold of my job.

Toby? No, I’m not seeing him any more, let alone planning to set up house together. I’m glad your listeners can’t see me blushing, because it will come as no surprise to hear that I haven’t laid eyes on him since the day of the theft. I guess I was less attractive to him once it became clear I’d lost my big house on Trinity Avenue.

What can I say? Gentlemen prefer homeowners!

Obviously, I’m making light of this. A coping mechanism, no doubt. I’ve already told you I was starting to trust him, to believe I could love him. All I know for sure is that we parted that Friday with him promising to phone me at the weekend, but there was never any call. His phone, like Bram’s, has been out of service ever since. At least his vanishing is explicable in a way Bram’s never will be – imagine if I’d had to make a missing persons report on him as well! They’d think I was some sort of black widow.

‘He’s probably spending a bit of quality time with his wife,’ Polly said, when I told her. ‘Have you tried putting his picture into Google to see what comes up?’

I had to admit I had no photo to try.

‘He wouldn’t let you take one, would he? Oh, Fi, how could you have missed all these obvious signs? You know what I think? I think the wife was pregnant and you were his maternity cover fling. And I bet he didn’t work for any Department of Transport think tank. I bet he was a car salesman. No, a traffic warden.’

At least she didn’t say ‘I told you so’, not in those exact words, though if she had, it would have been as good a line as any to end my story.

Because this is the end. There is nothing more.

#VictimFi

@deadheadmel No way, that’s it?

@IngridF2015 @deadheadmel Like she says, it’s still a live investigation.

@richieschambers @deadheadmel @IngridF2015 I think we’re looking at a part deux, people.

@deadheadmel @IngridF2015 Where is he, then? Come on, join the chat @BramLawson!!

@pseudobram @deadheadmel @IngridF2015 I’m right here, ladies! Just cracking open my third bottle of red.

@deadheadmel @pseudobram @IngridF2015 Ha, a parody account already. Love it!





Bram, Word document

I’ll be signing off today with digits, not letters; with the confirmation that I’ve returned the money. You’ll find it in the same account the solicitors paid it into in the first place, just a regular UK high street savings account, opened online with the requisite forms of ID easily ‘borrowed’ from Fi’s files at Trinity Avenue. It’s accessible to either account holder individually, which I hope will help.

You don’t need to know where it’s been these last weeks, only that I transferred it to somewhere untraceable by him. Him and his contacts. But with this confession, this warning, I trust you to keep it safe now for Fi and the boys.

You will have deduced by now that I defrauded the fraudsters. The crucial act of double-crossing took place while I was in the air between London and Geneva, but I didn’t know for sure that I’d succeeded until several days later, when I located an internet café here in Lyon and satisfied myself that there were no cameras or unusually suspicious staff and I could probably risk fifteen minutes online.

That was probably my final moment of earthbound joy, connecting to the internet for the last (sorry, penultimate) time and seeing that the money was there, it definitely was, sitting in an anonymous offshore account outside the search capabilities of the UK government. ‘Beyond their tentacles,’ as Mike put it. Beyond his.